


Give Sound to Joy

by sprx77



Series: The Bards Will Sing [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bard Magic, Don't say I didn't warn you, Fifteen Year Old Harry is Made of Angst in Canon so you can't fault me for that, Fire Lizards, I REGRET NOTHING, I mean it, JK did it not me, Pre-Order of the Phoenix, Prepare for a bit of canon bending and gratuitous disney songs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-20
Updated: 2015-03-20
Packaged: 2018-03-18 17:48:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3578415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sprx77/pseuds/sprx77
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It all starts when Harry gets fed up and a burst of accidental magic transports him far from 'home'. On the upside, he doesn't have to stay with the Dursleys any more this summer. (The downside is that he's stuck on what appears to be a deserted island in the middle of the ocean with nothing but his wand; it is still, Harry decides, better than the alternative.) #Worth it. </p><p>Or: Everything changes when the fire lizards attack</p>
            </blockquote>





	Give Sound to Joy

**Author's Note:**

> "Oh Tongue, give sound to joy and..."  
> Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey.
> 
> (The Harper Hall Trilogy remains my absolute favorite book series).
> 
> Note: Harry is a great big ball of angst because JK Rolling said so. He hit his peak angst at the beginning of Fair Order of the Phoenix, and that is where we lay our scene... He mellows out a bit more after he gets used to the whole 'trapped on a deserted island' thing. Working for your survival leaves little room for melodramatic episodes. Too busy to angst, coming soon.

> "Nothing is safe from you. If I were to court a girl who lived on an iceberg in the middle of the ocean, sooner or later— probably sooner— I’d look up to see you swooping overhead on a broomstick."
> 
> — [Diana Wynne Jones](https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4260.Diana_Wynne_Jones) ([Howl's Moving Castle](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6294.Howl_s_Moving_Castle))
> 
> (If there was no 4th wall, Harry would snark at Fate like no tomorrow.)

Surrey was not cold this time of year. Surrey, London, England was in fact just hot enough that anyone outside in jeans was probably regretting it. In Little Whinging, Surrey, a boy-not-yet-a-man walked along a deserted sidewalk.

The heat was hazy even with the sun going down. The wind was just the barest hint of a whisper, enough to make an abandoned swing from a rundown park creak on the chains holding it, but not enough to facilitate more than a half-hearted sway.

The boy walking didn’t notice the wind or the lack thereof any more than he noticed the barely moving swing or the tree leaves yellowed-with-the-lack-of-rain (yes, a lack of rain England, which one might think was odd enough to take note of) or the way the dipping sun painted the horizon like brilliant fire.

He was lost in the way that everyone is, at some point in their lives. Lost, not in that he didn’t know where he was, physically, but in the sense that he’d lost his way.

Harry Potter had had a long, trying year and was having a—somehow—even worse summer.

Harry had no illusions of grandeur. He didn’t expect a hero’s welcome, an instant pedestal, or any form of deference. He expected a modicum of respect. If not—as he has more than proved he is-- as a capable wizard, then as a person.

There was a lot of anger in Harry Potter. He would have recognized its source even if he didn’t dream of it nigh on every night. What he couldn’t understand was why they’d left him _alone_ to deal with it. He did _not_ need—any form of therapy. Or whatever. Or to talk about his feelings. To go over what happened and nitpick the details.

But even he, in the midst of it, couldn’t see how they justified dropping him off and cutting off all his communication. The owls could be intercepted, yes. He _accepted_ that.

(There were only so many times he could read, “We’ll tell you everything as soon as we can!” before wanting to snap.)

Harry felt betrayed and angry. Of everything, the betrayal stung the strongest. What he’d seen in the third task was _literally_ the stuff of nightmares. And they’d just leave him alone, after that?

He wanted to laugh. Of course they would. When had he ever been treated as a mere wizard? When others went through trauma severe enough to haunt them for decades, he was given a pat on the back and not even the slightest bit of medical attention.

He was meant to be special, somehow. Able to shake off the kind of psychological damage that came from such encounters. Always smiling—Merlin forbid he get angry. He’s not allowed to feel anger, to be sad, or anything other than the perfect golden boy.

Harry had killed a man with his bare hands when he was eleven years old and barely understood how magic worked. Fought and slain a legendary monster most had never seen. Fended off hundreds of _soul-sucking demons_ that were—by the way—his _actual worst fear_.

(He never got any happy moments growing up. Warmth was rare and precious. Everything was dark and no one loved him. Dementors brought that back with a vengeance, took away his hard-won happy memories and—basest of all—used the only memory he had of his mother and father to _hurt him_. Used their sacrifice, their love for him, to make him feel cold and hungry and alone in the dark like he’d been for as long as he could remember.

People tend to forget—or maybe he intentionally keeps them from realizing—that he spent so many more years inside that cupboard than away from it. Four years at Hogwarts; a decade in the dark.)

And then the tournament. Voldemort. He had a face to go with the name. Before, when someone said the name, he’d gotten flashes of memory and sensation and sound rather than a visual image.

“You-know-who,” they said, and Harry _did_ know. He knew the terror of the shade of him, as a first year, his face protruding grotesquely from a weak man’s skull. Knew the madness in Tom Riddle, Jr.’s eyes as he set lose a primordial snake on children, of _"I'm going to sit here and watch you die, Harry Potter. Take your time. I'm in no hurry.”_

Of,

_Kill the spare--_

_I can touch him now--_

_Bow to death, Harry—_

For so long, his earliest memory had been a flash of green light and high, cruel laughter.

Now he had the precious seconds before—the terrible, but precious seconds—of his mother and father dying. Of _Take Harry and run!_

(And he should be horrified. Should flinch away from his parent’s death. Their last moments. He should not be happy to remember, should certainly not _cherish them_ , the memories, the sound of his mother’s voice begging for his life—)

_Not Harry, not Harry, please no, take me, kill me instead—_

Harry had no one to talk to and all the time in the world to think and feel. He was alone, as he had been for most of his life, as he had been ever since James and Lily Potter gave their lives for him.

He wasn’t overreacting. He couldn’t be. _It’s just a few weeks_ , he was sure they’d tell him later. _Why are you freaking out? Just a few weeks. You’ve spent years with your relatives before._ They’d call him an attention seeker, spoiled, whiny.

And they would be wrong. How could he be overreacting? It felt like there was this _thing_ inside his chest, clawing from the inside. He _felt_ so much and it was overwhelming and terrible.

He could see the Prophet now, the words they would use, that Rita Skeeter and her ilk would use: teenage angst; Snape would sneer at him for the weakness, for wanting special treatment, for daring to breathe when he was obviously _such a waste of space_.

The emotions and memories tore him up inside. His head felt like what the Shrieking Shack must’ve looked like when Remus had gone to Hogwarts, everything shredded and broken. It was so draining. Exhausting. He wanted it to _stop_.

He wanted the comfort of at least talking to someone who cared that he existed, who saw him as more than unwelcome gum on the bottom of his shoe, and it made him feel shallow and guilty and petty when he realized how much he wanted _just one kind word_.

(He had a godfather who broke out of prison for him, became a fugitive, braved dementors and aurors and traitors; who claimed to love him but left him _alone_ _like this—_

Guild immediately crept in at the thought. For doubting Sirius firstly; second, for daring to want more than he already had—the closest thing to a family he’d ever known—for asking for more than Sirius had already given him, which was in itself more than he’d ever hoped for.)

A month and a week had passed since he’d been dropped off here.

He had noticed his helpless slip into rage and despair and bitterness. It was building up in him and he had _no way of letting it out_. He couldn’t talk to anyone, had no one in Little Whinging who gave two fucks if he lived or died, couldn’t even string together a chain of violent spells in the direction of some straw dummy or the like—to vent his frustrations on—no outlet whatsoever. He was trapped, for all that he could walk wherever he wanted, just as much as a caged animal.

He was the snake in the zoo and didn’t even have people knocking on the class to distract him. Nobody was going to vanish the glass with accidental magic, either. He _would_ settle for a snake to talk to, as creepy as everyone else found it— _everything he did was wrong, even if he was born with the magical ability to do it, of course—_ if only for someone who could talk _back_.

The sun was setting. He knew he should head back to the house. Any time after Dudley returned was too late and any time before, too early. Any time Harry came back at all was a disappointment to his relatives, really.

He turned sharply about, agitated, ready to stomp or sulk or make his way angrily back to his cell within the prison. He felt like laughing with nothing close to humor. 

_What I wouldn’t give to be--_

All the pent up emotions in him surged suddenly in his chest. The feeling—he briefly recognized it as _pure magic_ , impossible and potent and waiting to be _directed_ —swept through him, pounding and impatient until it overflowed, rushing out of his core. It should probably have hurt, but it didn’t, and Harry didn’t have time to question. Between one heartbeat and the next the wave of magic crested within him and flowed out over his skin in a cascade of warm, shocking power.

Between one second and the next Harry Potter had turned on his heel and vanished in a burst of magic.

 

 

\-- _anywhere but here._

 

**Author's Note:**

> I adore the idea of bardic!Harry. I blame Guardian_of_hope for surprising me with their story and now singing magic has wormed it's way into my long standing desire for Harper Hall Trilogy crossovers with Harry Potter. Also, Dallas: for D&D. I've seen magic singing/voices being used before, but only with the combination of these three influences did the ideas playing around in my head snap together and unite into something I really want to write. I just spent two hours researching D&D stuff because I have so many idea's from this 'verse.


End file.
